“Elsbeth,” the latest case-of-the-week show in “The Good Wife” cinematic universe, shares a lot with its predecessors. Like “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” “Elsbeth” features a female lawyer, a roster of all-star guests, liberal sensibilities and a seemingly endless costume budget. The new show follows its titular character as she transitions from Chicago-based defense attorney to New York, where she serves as an outside observer to the NYPD following a consent decree.
Besides the shows it was spun off from, “Elsbeth,” shares DNA with another, perhaps, surprising source: the cozy mystery. Elsbeth may be a New York-based lawyer — not the owner of a smalltown bakery or knitting store — but she’s far more similar to a cozy mystery heroine than she is to “The Good Wife’s” stoic Alicia Florrick or the effortlessly chic Diane Lockhart of both “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight.”
Elsbeth, played by “True Blood’s” Carrie Preston, in contrast, is a quirky, perennially underestimated woman, called by a man she ultimately arrests for murder, “oddly persistent … and persistently odd.” It’s those same oddities that make her such an effective investigator.
A Vacation With Murder
The cozy mystery, in its current iteration, first hit bookstores and libraries in the 1990s. Cozies don’t feature the blood, gore or sex depicted in more hardboiled detective stories. Instead, these mysteries follow an amateur sleuth, almost always a woman, solving a murder that takes place off-page. They often have punny titles (my favorite: Assaulted Caramel by Amanda Flower), prominently feature pets and include recipes the characters cook so readers can try them at home.
They are in the words of Agatha-Award-winning cozy author Ellen Byron, “A vacation with murder…You become involved with the people and their lives, and you know at the end, justice will be served. There’s something very comforting about knowing, in a world where we have so little control, that we at least have control in this particular genre of books.”
Marty Knepper, a former English professor at Morningside College and expert on mystery fiction, conducted a survey of cozy mysteries in 2018 and found “96 percent of the sleuth’s jobs/hobbies can be considered ‘fun’ and 75 percent ‘stereotypically female.’”
Often, the skills and knowledge from those “stereotypically female” careers or pastimes help the heroine crack the case. Elaine Viets, Dying in Style, features a mystery shopper with a deep knowledge of fashion, who evades her attacker by dangling from a mall chandelier from her well-made purse. When the murderer tries the same move with her knock-off handbag, she falls. In Forget Me Knot by Mary Marks, the sleuth uncovers the identity of the murderer through the knot pattern in a quilt the victim made. The heroine of Kristin Davis’s The Diva Spices it Up catches the assailant by asking a few questions about a flower bouquet.
Cozies offer readers and writers an alternative world where women “earn a stable living doing what they love, often traditional feminine pursuits dealing with food, books, and handicrafts,” according to Knepper. In short, they imagined a world where women’s work was valued.
Cozy Communities
Elsbeth may be a big-city lawyer, but her approach to solving murders wouldn’t be out of place in a novel with a punny title.
In the first season finale, for example, Elsbeth’s obsession with brightly colored, floral blazers helps her befriend a suspect, who she later proves is a murderer with the help of her dog, who quite literally digs up a clue. In later episodes, her observations about one suspect’s purse and another’s rug cause her to solve the case. The celebration of the traditionally feminine extends beyond Elsbeth. Her mentee, Kaya, a young NYPD officer, helps find a culprit through her obsession with a “Real Housewives” type TV show.
More broadly, Elsbeth’s seemingly ditzy demeanor combined with her appearance, including those blazers, a minimum of three tote bags and, often, mittens, leads murder suspects to underestimate her intelligence. They open up to Elsbeth, not expecting her to be able to connect the dots. Elsbeth uses others’ perennial misreading of her to her own advantage.
The strongest connection “Elsbeth,” the show, and Elsbeth, the character, have to the cozy mystery genre is their concern with community. Cozy mystery heroines often run coffee shops or bars that serve as gathering places for friends, family and neighbors. They typically begin their investigations to clear the name of a loved one or to restore order to their community.
Over the course of season one, Elsbeth expresses as much interest — if not more — in building a new life in New York as she does in finding murders. At her housewarming party, packed for someone who just moved to the city, a colleague remarks, “You made a lot of friends.” Elsbeth responds, “When I was putting together my invitation list, I realized a lot of the people I became friends with turned out to be murderers.”
Like the best cozy heroines, Elsbeth knows catching killers is a great way to make friends.
–Season 2 of “Elsbeth” premiered on October 17, 2024.
